¶ … Consequences of Incarceration on an Increasingly Homogenized Labor Market
It strongly appears that there is a direct correlation between incarceration and its effects on the labor market. A review of articles pertaining to this subject suggests that this relationship is largely causal in nature. The reality of the situation is that there are increasing rates of incarceration (Travis and Western 233) in the United States in the 21st century. Thus, it is accurate to state that the effects of incarceration on the labor market are increasing as well, and resonate throughout it both in terms of the lot of the individuals who have experienced incarceration, and on the labor market in general.
The most eminent effect of incarceration on the labor market involves the fact that there is marked difficulty obtaining employment for those who have endured incarceration. There are several factors contributing to this reality. Many employers conduct background checks on potential employees and mandate that they reveal their criminal history. As such, these employers typically prefer to hire individuals who have not endured incarceration, particularly in instances in which there is a felony. In this
More acutely, however, is the consequence that for those who have been incarcerated, it is increasingly difficult to obtain steady, gainful employment.
Another significant effect of incarceration on the labor market relates to issues of remuneration. Specifically, it is not uncommon for those who have endured incarceration to earn less money than their counterparts who have never spent a substantial amount of time in prison do. Perhaps the primary reason for this situation is that many ex-convicts are simply fortunate to get a job at all -- since they are much less likely to get hired than those without criminal records. The subsequent quotation readily verifies this fact. "For many ex-prisoners, however, labor market prospects after prisoner are bleak. Several studies of ex-prisoner populations report that roughly half remain jobless up to a year after their release" (Travis and Western 233). Consequently, it is not surprising that those who are able to find employment are subjected to lower wages than those who were never incarcerated. In fact, "incarceration reduces wages and employment among former prisoners" (Travis and Western 233). The correlation between these two results is fairly obvious. Since there are…
African-American Incarceration African-American Race and the Criminal Justice System: The Effect on Black Communities Racial Disparities and Incarceration Recent studies have shown that race is a factor in the criminal justice system. For example, a study analyzing statewide sentencing outcomes in Pennsylvania for 1989-1992, found that, net of controls: (1) young black males are sentenced more harshly than any other group, (2) race is most influential in the sentencing of younger rather than
The High Incarceration Rate: A Significant Issue Faced by the Criminal Justice System Abstract This paper examines the problem of the high rate of incarceration in America. This is a major challenge for the criminal justice system, as many people, families and communities suffer as a result of this high rate. It prevents individuals from improving their lives and can lead to the deterioration of families and neighborhoods. The paper discusses some
Introduction Race has always been a cultural factor in the U.S. and it is certainly a factor in today’s criminal justice system. James (2018:30) has shown that current “research on police officers has found that they tend to associate African Americans with threat” (30). A significantly higher percentage of the African American population is incarcerated than any other population in the U.S. And, worse, as Lopez (2018) points out, “Black people
Japanese internment camps are a dark period of American history. The forced incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent was based solely on racism and a culture of fear. During World War II, Americans also counted Italians and Japanese as their archrivals but of these groups, it was only Japanese-Americans that were rounded up and placed into concentration camps. Just as African-American soldiers could not serve alongside their white counterparts,
American Corrections The statistics about imprisoned Americans in jails of local, state, and federal prisons and juvenile detention centers reveals a growth from 1,319,000 numbers in 2002 to 2,166,260 in 2002. During the year 2003 has seen the fastest rate of growth of imprisonment over the period of recent four years. The rate of growth of prisoners in state prisons is estimated to 1.8% while that in federal prisons is 7.1%
(362) One additional note on this half of the duel research study was that the pair of applicants with and without fictitious criminal records was rotated throughout the experiment to reduce the odds that a single applicant would alter results if assigned the rigid role of ex-con or clean record applicant. In the second half of the research study the same set of potential employers was surveyed using a vignette
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